There is currently a growing demand for high quality multimedia. The current demand for high-definition television (HDTV) is one example of this phenomenon. Accordingly, there is a corresponding demand for devices and technologies that are capable of providing high quality multimedia to users in increasing quality, while reducing reliance upon wired connections. As a result, a drive toward high quality wireless multimedia transmission techniques is underway. As a result of this drive, improved interfaces for transmitting data streams that may include, for example, all-digital audio/video capable interfaces have been developed. High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is an example of one such interface that is growing in popularity. HDMI is capable of transmitting uncompressed streams (video/audio) over a wireless channel. As such, HDMI and other interfaces with similar capabilities are likely to be popular for use in applications such as mmWave (millimeter wave) 60 GHz systems to transmit uncompressed signals at a rate of about 2 Gb/s.
Applications like mmWave applications represent uses of the extremely high frequency (EHF) radio frequency band. Applications in this range may provide very high data rates that can be used for transmitting uncompressed data in a streaming format. However, such applications are currently most useful in relatively short range communication environments. Moreover, in order to minimize battery drain for mobile devices, there is also a desire to keep power relatively low for many such applications. The use of lower power generally results in a low signal to noise ratio (SNR) environment. At high SNR, neighboring bits can more easily be distinguished. However, at low SNRs, neighboring bits are closer together in magnitude and could more easily get mixed up or confused. This issue is important because video data, for example, generally includes a sequence of frames in which each pixel in a frame of video includes three bytes of data to provide red, green and blue (RGB) values for the pixel. This digital representation of the color of each pixel could then be more likely to include errors which may degrade signal quality in this environment.
In this regard, a standard representation of an RGB value is an eight bit number defining an intensity value in a range between 0 and 255 (e.g., an RGB value of 128 is provided as 10000000). The standard representation is often referred to as a gray value or a gray scale value. In a particular gray value, the most significant bit (MSB) is the first bit (e.g., 1 in the example given above) and the least significant bit (LSB) is the last bit. Errors in wireless transmission are virtually inevitable. Accordingly, it may be appreciated that errors are more tolerable (e.g., may be experienced with less impact on the gray value) for bits closer to the LSB and less tolerable for bits closer to the MSB.
Bit labeling, which is also called bit mapping, is important to consider with respect to potential transmission errors. For example, after multiplexing RGB video data certain errors may be more dominant than others. In this regard, nearest neighbor errors may be most likely to occur. Gray mapping, which is a common type of bit mapping, includes adjacent signal points having bit labels that differ in as few bits as possible (e.g., one), therefore having a Hamming distance of one. Given that the Hamming distance is typically one for conventional modulation schemes, error detection capabilities (and therefore error correction capabilities) may be limited to some extent.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide a mechanism to overcome at least some of the disadvantages described above.